Wind bag

Hold your bio-fuelled horses, IPCC. There’s a competing voice of erudition on global warming, and his stance comes from the source of so much Republican logic—out of an ass. During the U.S. Congress’s first hearing on the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report that blamed global warming on human activity, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher challenged the report’s merits, based on its theory as to what caused a greenhouse gas spike 55 million years back. Having examined sediment core analyses, scientists suggest it was a fairly rapid release of methane from the ocean floor, but Rohrabacher prefers to roll old school.

“We don’t know what those other cycles were caused by in the past,” he told Congress. “Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know?”

In strong contrast to Rohrabacher, California Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi condemned conservatives for dismissing the IPCC’s science. A poll taken after the IPCC report’s release showed a mere 13 per cent of Republican representatives believe humans are responsible for current global warming trends. Numbers on how many agree dinosaurs walked the Earth with men were unavailable.

—Scott Saxon